Over at HPC Admin, Douglas Eadline writes that adding and removing software from a running cluster is not as difficult as it used to be.
Regardless of the provisioning system, the goal is to make changes without having to reboot nodes. Not all changes can be made without booting nodes (i.e., changing the underlying provisioning); however, many application packages can be added or removed without too much trouble if some simple steps are taken.
Read the Full Story.
I’ve got to say I’m a bit puzzled about this, I’ve been involved in HPC for almost 10 years now and I’ve never run a cluster where you’ve had to reboot a node after installing software. We just install software into:
/usr/local/$package-$compiler/$version
and then Modules (http://modules.sf.net/) to let users add/remove packages from their environment (and set up a default set for them of course).